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When Pepper gets back from New York, Tony is waiting on the tarmac to pick her up. He drives his own car, wears a suit, and holds up a sign with her name on it—highly unnecessary, given that it's a private airfield and she is the jet's only passenger.
She walks past him without comment, pulling her wheeled suitcase behind her; it isn't until she actually heaves the bag into the backseat that he realizes he probably should have offered to help.
They stop at a McDonald’s along the highway, because Pepper loses the coin toss. She collects the food while he waits in the car; together, they are certain to be recognized. She also pays for the food, and flaps her hand dismissively when he pulls out his wallet. Which is just as well, since Tony rarely carries small bills.
They sit outside at a round concrete table, both striking in their immaculate business attire. It’s a perfect cloudless afternoon—nothing but hot, blue sky and clean, hard lines for miles around. Tony digs into the brown paper sack and lines up his three cardboard burger boxes, his carton of fries, his chocolate milkshake. Surprisingly, Pepper makes no remark on any of his choices. She sits and watches him with her hands in her lap and her shoulders rolled forward: folded up into herself, guarded.
Tony does most of the talking—Pepper’s been making small talk for days of endless meetings, and she isn’t naturally outgoing or loquacious to begin with. It's taken him three late-night long-distance calls to New York, rife with long, uncomfortable pauses, to be able to firmly grasp this fact.
“I told Fury about us,” he tells her proudly. “Not the details—I told him we were in a stable… relationship.”
Pepper cracks the blue top of her bottled water and takes a sip. “Did you pause like that when you said it?” she inquires.
“A little bit, yeah.”
“I think it’s a bit soon to be telling people.” She carefully assembles her Greek salad—using only about a third of the dressing, which strikes Tony as an exercise in frustration. However, since Pepper has refrained from comment on his lunch, he pays her the same courtesy. “Don’t you?”
Tony shrugs. “I feel like everybody kind of knows anyway.”
Her eyes narrow ominously. “Everybody who?”
“Rhodey and I are getting an award,” he announces, blithely changing the subject. “A medal. For saving everyone at the Expo. You should come to the thing.”
“The thing?”
“You know. The presentation. It’s in Washington, next week. You should come.”
Pepper looks distinctly nonplussed. “I’ll check my schedule,” she tells him.
“I’m getting a medal,” he repeats, slowly, as if there’s a chance she might have misunderstood. “You’re my girlfriend. I’d like you to be there.”
She shoots him an icy glare, and he suddenly wishes he hadn’t chosen to use the word ‘girlfriend,’ or the possessive, and especially not both in the same statement. He crams the rest of his burger into his mouth and chews vigorously to avoid compounding the offense.
“I got everyone out of there while you guys were shooting up the place,” she observes. Her tone is calm, even pleasant, but she spears a piece of lettuce on her little plastic fork with slightly more enthusiasm than necessary.
He’s so relieved that she isn’t angry at him that he forgets to respond to what she’s actually saying. “Is that all you’re going to eat?” he asks.
“Is that all you’re going to eat?” she counters, indicating the neat little pile of empty cardboard boxes stacked in front of him.
Determined not to make things worse, he keeps his mouth shut, and alternates between watching her pick at her salad and gazing out at the dry chaparral.
He considers, for the first time, the kind of steel and determination it would take to coordinate an evacuation of that size—police, EMTs, event staff, presenters, tens of thousands of panicked bystanders. To stand alone on those steps, the captain going down with the ship, doing her level best to preserve his desperate last grasp at a legacy.
“I love you, you know,” he says hopefully. She hasn’t said it since the day he brought the cactus, and he doesn’t want to push her too much, even though hearing it would be reassuring.
She doesn’t say it back, but she does scoot closer to him on the concrete bench. Steals a small pile of his fries. He moves his hand over her back before anchoring it to her hip, his arm slung low around her waist. It’s a scaled-down version of what he wants to do—acts which would probably get both of them arrested by the highway patrol.
He hears himself say, “Stable-ish.”
“What?”
“I didn’t tell Fury we were stable. I told him we were stable… ish.”
She pats his knee affectionately under the table. “It’s honest, at least.” She leaves her hand there, her soft palm cradling sinew and bone.
He nods.
“You didn't have to call me every night, you know.”
“I know.”
Her smile is sidelong, coy. “But it was nice that you did.”
“I know,” he repeats, with a cocky grin.
She gives him a look that makes it clear she does not find his overconfidence appealing.
He reaches out and brushes her cheek with his fingertips, tucks a few errant strands of hair behind her ear. Stamps a kiss onto her forehead. Closes his eyes and breathes in her perfume—Chanel No. 5, vivid and summer-bright.
Imprinted on his mind's eye are the cacti and tough desert scrub. It's the kind of landscape you could drive right through, day after day, without ever realizing its potential: deceptively humble and harmless, until a solitary spark on the wind sets the entire horizon ablaze.
“You deserve a medal,” he whispers.
-- “Drive”
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